Enzo Cucchi

 For his first show at the gallery, Cucchi presents recent sculptures, paintings, and drawings. As one enters, facing the wall, a Madonna bronze sculpture holds a bell that can be rung. Four large drawings suspended from the ceiling depict animal and human figures. As the artists states : “Each one of them acts as a key to understanding the exhibition. The drawings aren’t hung directly on the wall as they usually would be...Each one of the depicted figures could eventually escape their image to enter into the exhibition space.” On the main wall hangs a large three-dimensional gold painting entitled “Pietra” (“Stone”) (2017). In another room, a series of small oil paintings represent eerie scenes and bifurcated faces : “Lontana” (“Far”), 2014 , “Vieni con me” (“Come With Me”), 2015, “Ghiaccio...Bollente” (“Ice…Boiling”), 2015, “Alzati” (“Stand Up”), 2015 and “Cinema Pasolini”, 2015.

Born in Morro d’Alba, Italy in 1949, Cucchi came to prominence in the late 1970s as a leading figure in the Transavanguardia movement alongside Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Nicola De Maria, and Mimmo Paladino. The term Transavanguardia was first coined in 1979 by critic and curator Achille Bonito Oliva to describe the group’s reintroduction of figuration and emotion into painting and sculpture as a reaction to the predominant conceptual and minimalist tendencies of the time.